Atonement (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Ian McEwan
- First Published: 2002
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: 1935, 1941, and 1999
- Setting: Surrey, Dunkirk, and London
- Principal Characters: Briony Tallis, Cecilia Tallis, Robbie Turner, Grace Turner, Leon Tallis, Lola Quincey, Emily Tallis, Paul Marshall, Pierrot, Sister Drummond
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Language or languages, Twentieth century, Authors or writers, Europe or Europeans, 1940’s, Guilt, Class consciousness, 1930’s, England or English people, War, Upper classes, Storytelling, Women, Scotland or Scottish people, 1990’s, Western Europe or western Europeans, Old age or elderly people, Career women, Great Britain, Atonement
- Locales: Dunkirk, France, London, England, Surrey, England
It was commonplace in the nineteenth century English novel that the author was God—omniscient and omnipotent within the fictional universe that exists between the covers of a book. Novelists such as William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) and George Eliot (1819-1880) exercised their divine privilege through overt intrusions into the narrative to arrange the lives of their characters and to tell the reader what to think. Rejecting that model and metaphor, modernism assigns novelists a more modest role—to transcribe their characters’ states of consciousness.
Early in her...
[The entire page is 1809 words long]
